Robert Johnson pwns Eric Clapton

by zunguzungu

Eric Clapton once described Johnson as, “the most important blues singer that ever lived”…[but] nearly 50 years after Columbia first packaged his work as King of the Delta Blues, we discover that we’ve been listening to these immortal songs at the wrong speed all along. Either the recordings were accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78, or else they were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting. Whatever, the common consensus among musicologists is that we’ve been listening to Johnson at least 20% too fast. Numerous bloggers have helpfully slowed down Johnson’s best-known work and provided samples so that, for the first time, we can hear Johnson as he intended to be heard.

I, like many people, only know of Robert Johnson through Eric Clapton; I know Cream’s Crossroads a lot better than Johnson’s, and like it more too. But I love the fact that the figure of origin, used to authenticate electric blues by so many white electric bluesmen like Clapton, cannot now be disentangled from studio gimmickry. Part of the Clapton thing was that he was supposed to be taking the acoustic, rural, old, and black song of the Robert Johnson figure and making it young and white and modern and urban and electric. Rock and Roll as the electrified blues is every hack music journalist’s favorite cliche. And now it turns out that Johnson was himself playing games in the studio, that the authentic backdrop which your white bluesbreakers were trying to modernize was already always a function of industrial reproduction. Lovely. And yet, your music writers still can’t get over the desire to return to the original rural black acoustic singer — the completely unsupported sense that “he intended to be heard” as slow rather than fast — because of course, Johnson himself couldn’t have been the one who speeded up his playing on tape to make it sound more awesome. Only white people get to speed up and electrify his songs…

I’ve never taken it to be part of Clapton’s “thing” that “he was supposed to be taking the acoustic, rural, old, and black song of the Robert Johnson figure and making it young and white and modern and urban and electric.” Chicago blues had already made it modern and urban and electric.

And the tendency to read rustic authenticity into old recordings is not limited to Johnson’s work, or to that of other black blues musicians of the period. The overly reverent folk movement of the 60s was predicated on precisely this move with respect to the records collected in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. That these were stuido recordings made with intention by the musicians in question, and not field recordings, was just not considered.

It’s of course quite possible that Johnson sought the effect the records achieved by being sped up, if sped up they were. It’s also possible it’s a mistake, the kind of mistake that has happened plenty of times since. (I seem to recall that Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue had been at the wrong speed, and was only “fixed” for it’s most recent but one reissue.)

I understand your basic point, and it normally holds (like, recall some white listeners not considering the idea that maybe R. Kelly means for his records to be funny). I like how you put it, that the authenticity was “already always a function of industrial reproduction”, but, again, I don’t think the aim of the “white bluesbreakers” was to modernize it. They just thought it was cool! And then did their own thing with it! (And, anyway, as filtered through the layer of recordings heard in the UK.)

Richard, interesting. I’m putting it pretty quickly and easily there – certainly what Clapton thought he was doing was different than what others did — so I’m not trying to stake out a position, exactly, but I do feel like the white blues guys like him did have an elvis effect of displacing the very chicago guys they learned from (and effectively, whether intentionally or not, put johnson on a weird kind of pedestal). Not their fault, of course — though one of the reasons I love Michael Bloomfield is that he, much more than Clapton, carried a lot more of the diversity of chicago blues into his music — but there’s a certain hardening of “the traditional” around a particular image of the rural acoustic bluesman that the image of the urban electric blues rocker tends to create. I haven’t thought a tremendous amount about this, but I do think the whole clapton and Johnson thing is much more apparent than real, much more a function of narrative desire for that particular comparison; certianly Clapton’s actual playing is far more indebted to Albert King than Johnson (or at least it always seemed to me, not an expert).

I don’t know nearly enough about Johnson or the blues to have a real opinion on this, but it’s pretty fascinating. And this–“Johnson himself couldn’t have been the one who speeded up his playing on tape to make it sound more awesome. Only white people get to speed up and electrify his songs…” reminds me of the story some people tell about the earliest ska musicians not realizing that their radios had poor reception and thinking that the American soul songs they were inspired by actually sounded like that.

Stairway to Heaven. It’s always winnnig contests as the beast rock song but it’s not particularly great. In fact, you could argue it’s not good, and not even the best song off the album it comes off of. If I were working hard, I could argue that it’s the *worst* song off of IV.

Ethan,
Yeah. You know it’s worth emphasizing sometimes: good musicians are inspired by good music. Race is never absent, but what Eric Clapton said about the blues is so much less interesting than what he played about it. And Derek and the Dominoes remains an incredible piece of work.

I don’t have a link handy to where I saw the argument made, but my understanding of the story is that, supposedly, Jamaicans were listening to distant broadcasts from American radio stations playing soul music, and as a result of the poor reception they thought that the music had rapid “hiccups”–resulting in the rhythm we now associate with ska. Far-fetched and insulting.

Just a note that it is genuinely possible to have been much more excited by Robert Johnson recordings than by Eric Clapton recordings. (And thank you — one doesn’t get many occasions on which it’s appropriate to note such a thing! And by an Elvis fan, to boot!)

Duncan’s nitpick isn’t a nitpick. However, it sometimes happened that producers slowed recording down (i.e., sped the records up) to account for the gap between the available length of a disk and the habits of musicians trained to leave their audiences satisfied. I’ve also heard plenty of blues and hillbilly songs in which a double-or-more tempo is clearly being urged on the performer in the last verse or so.

All that said, the records are awesome, and I haven’t read accusations of misrepresentation by those who knew Johnson personally (or those who said they did). Note that the linked crank’s (and I label him lovingly, as a fellow crank) page particularly disputes the testimony of Don Law, who was in the room while the recordings were made.

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